The liberal blog of Matthew Rozsa, a PhD student of American history at Lehigh University. As a political columnist, his work has appeared in more than half a dozen publications, among them PolicyMic, "The Morning Call," "The Newark Star-Ledger," "The Trenton Times," "The Express Times," and university newspapers for Bard College and Rutgers-Newark.
He can be reached at mlr511@lehigh.edu.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Hypnotizing Jews: Rand Paul & Co. Expose Obama's Diabolical Scheme

Did you think the radical right had lost its marbles when it claimed Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States?

Was it clear that things could get no wackier when they insisted his health care reform bill included death panels to extirpate the elderly and disabled?

Were you certain they’d reached a critical mass of lunacy when they hysterically declared that his back-to-school speech was really an attempt to indoctrinate America’s children with socialism?

In the words of Al Jolson… you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Apparently two Republican members of Congress and a Republican Senator-elect believe one of Obama’s secrets to winning the 2008 election was…

Hypnotizing the Jews.

I am not creative enough to make this up.

According to “The Jewish Forward”, a right-wing coalition of doctors known as the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) “published an article in 2008 wondering if Obama is ‘a brilliant orator, or a hypnotist?’ The answer, according to the paper published on the group’s website, is that Obama has used in his speeches ‘covert hypnosis intended only for licensed therapists on consenting patients.’ And those most affected by Obama’s covert hypnosis were Jewish voters.”

Further research has yielded that members of AAPS include Rand Paul, the Republican Senator-elect from Kentucky, as well as his father, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, and another radical conservative, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia. Given how active these men are in shaping and promoting the agenda of AAPS, they were no doubt both aware of and in agreement with the contents of the article which presented this outlandish argument.

That’s not all. According to the “professionals” at AAPS, Obama didn’t rely solely on oratory in his dastardly plot to hypnotize Hebrews. As the “Louisville Courier-Journal” reports, “the AAPS article notes that the Obama campaign logo ‘might just be the letter ‘O,’ but it also resembles a crystal ball, a favorite of hypnotists.’”

To be fair, it is true that 78% of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama in 2008. In fact, he received more votes from Jews than he did from members of any other white religious group (Protestants – 34%, Catholics – 47%, Evangelicals – 41%)* or, aside from blacks, any other ethnic group (Latinos – 67%, Asians – 62%, Whites – 43%). Considering that Obama’s overall popular vote performance was 53%, his disproportionate strength among Jews could very well be viewed as suspect – if, of course, one lacks historical perspective.

I mention historical perspective because, with it, one sees that Democrats have averaged 75% of the Jewish vote in every presidential election since 1928.

That was the year Al Smith’s nomination cemented the Democratic Party’s association with the cosmopolitan brand of liberalism that, throughout history, has tended to appeal to Jews. Since then, every Democratic presidential candidate has decisively won the Jewish vote. Indeed, with only one exception (Jimmy Carter in 1980), Democratic support among Jewish voters hasn’t fallen below 60% in that entire eighty year period.

In short, it seems reasonable to assume that the Jewish community’s historic affinity with liberalism – and as such with America’s liberal party, the Democrats – is more likely to have caused Obama’s solid Semitic support than any Svengalian code words or covert crystal balls.

Once that has been established, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Paul Broun have not only been proven wrong on this specific issue, but have lost the right to ever be taken seriously again. In part this is because society, for the sake of its collective intelligence, needs to draw a line separating the people who disseminate egregious stupidity from the ones who make meaningful contributions to our political discourse. More important, however, is the fact that an unmistakable strain of racism coils beneath the surface of the more vitriolic rumors being spread about our first black president. While there is no reason to question the motives of conservatives whose criticisms of Obama are based on legitimate ideological differences, the stench of bigotry – the kind that is fueled by sheer hatred before being made socially acceptable through the use of an indirect approach – contaminates the over-the-top asininity with which Obama is assailed today. The only thing separating AAPS’s theory from the allegations that Obama isn’t a native citizen, added death panels to his health care reform bill, or tried to spread socialism to our children is that AAPS adds a dash of anti-Semitism to the larger racist brew.

Besides, it’s ridiculous to believe that a tricked out ‘O’ could actually hypnotize Jews into voting for Barack Obama. I’m Jewish and the logo doesn’t have any effect on me…